just tried to post a diary with a web link and gave up after 4 failed attempts. The link never went live after I tried it four different ways. This is why I don’t visit BMG anymore.
bmg hard to use
hubspoke
| Wed, Jan 9, 2013
5:29 PM EST
BMG runs on WordPress, which has extensive help documentation here. Incidentally, BMG's traffic is at a record high, with over 1.3 million unique visitors in 2012, according to Google Analytics. - promoted by Bob_Neer
Discuss
19 Comments . Leave a comment below.…I had to post a comment to my own diaries to include any links. I finally figured out that when you write a post the body of the text has to be in “visual” as opposed to “html” mode for links within the diary text to work. Of course this could be another example of BMG’s new platform (I still miss Soapblox!) not being compatible with IE.
and I use Chrome.
david had to help me out.
please post a comment or email one of us and ask for help. The visual-vs.-html thing is a pretty simple fix — *once you know about it.* If you don’t, then yes, it’s hard to use.
So, when you hit “Write Post” at the top, and it brings you to the screen where you write and edit your post, make sure the little tab at the upper-right corner of the editing window says “visual”. That will give you all the formatting buttons and stuff you should recognize.
Does that make sense? Let me know.
We’re here to help — as is the hive mind.
and yes, christopher is right that you need to pay attention to whether you are using the “visual” or the “html” editor – you can toggle back and forth between them on the “write a new post” screen.
The easiest way – and the way that works in both editors – is to select the text that you wish to turn into a link, then click the “link” button (looks like a chain-link in the visual editor; says “link” in the html editor), and enter the URL in the pop-up box. If that doesn’t work, please let me know because something has gone wrong.
As for Soapblox, well, you might be interested to know that it is dead as a platform. Its new owners have announced that they are not investing any more resources into improving or updating it, and they are encouraging current users to transition onto … wait for it … WordPress.
This
I could see this being why you don’t post diaries, but that doesn’t really explain why you don’t come at all…
I’ve had issues publishing diaries via mobile, I click publish and they don’t post. Lost a post wishing y’all a happy new year and another about Hagel.
Maybe go into “My Account” and it might be there … I found it.
Whenever I post something via the WordPress app it doesn’t put it on the front page — probably because the whole multiple-page thing is something native to Kos/Soapbox that was an innovation to WordPress that we had to do from scratch …
Posted the Hagel one, little late for New Year though
so anyone familiar with WP should be fine. Even those of us working with ~gulp~ WP1.5.
This is not to say that there were not more awesome solutions. You’ll see.
Ive had issues with the link as well, even in the visual mode, is this a browser problem? (I use firefox)
do you mean just pasting a link directly into a post, or do you mean turning text into a link? The latter should work in both the visual and html editors as I described upthread. The former, well, it’s not great blogging practice – I’d much rather see people turn text into links whenever they want to post a link, rather than copying the long and unwieldy URL directly into the post.
Firefox should be fully compatible with this site, so I doubt that’s the problem.
I have never been able to turn text into links and have to copy the URL for it to appear on my posts. It was MUCH easier to do in the old format.
figured it out
I manually enter the html tag for each link, and I’ve never had a problem (on either the old or new platform).
When I’m writing a diary, I’m usually in “html” mode. The same approach works in editing a comment like this. The tag to use is the “anchor”. You only need one attribute, the “href” (this is the URL you want the link to point at). The “href” attribute is a key/value pair — the right-hand side is a string (you need the double quotes) containing a URL, and the “=” sign makes that string the value of the href attribute. The body (between the begin and end tags) will be the underlined content that the reader clicks on.
Here’s an example of what to enter, followed by how it appears in the finished diary or comment (the link won’t work, though!):
<a href=”http://www.some.target.url”>some link</a>
some link
I know that it’s perhaps tedious to do this, especially for new or infrequent participants. For those of us who comment and post frequently, this may be preferable to being constantly frustrated by the shortcomings of the platform or specific browsers.
when I click on “Write Post.” Never had any problems except I still don’t know how to embed photos or video?
Embedding photos should be pretty easy – in the visual editor, just click where it says “upload/insert” at the top left corner of the text box, right above the tool bar.
Video, however, can be fussy. To embed video, you need to switch to the HTML editor, and then paste in the embed code from whatever provider you are using. It usually works, but not always. With YouTube, I have had no trouble with the “new” (iframe) code, but others have reported difficulties.
I don’t use video too much but sometimes photos would be nice.
You need a URL for the photo itself. Once you have that, it’s pretty much the same as embedding a link (of course, with a different tag).
Use the “img” tag. The image tag has no “body”, and two attributes that matter, the “src” (for the url) and an optional “width” for setting the size of the image. Here’s an example (it doesn’t work):
<img src=”http://www.some.image.url.jpg” width=”400″ />
The “/” just before the trailing angle-bracket is “good form” for telling the world that there is no end-tag associated with this.
It really isn’t any harder to do manual tags like these, and you get MUCH more control over what happens.
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